Away from the Waves: A Chris Burkard Travel Gallery Experience

📸 The moment the gallery stopped being about waves

I stood knee-deep in glacial silt near Landmannalaugar, wind stinging my cheeks, camera shutter clicking on automatic — not because I saw a wave, but because I’d just realized away-from-the-waves-a-chris-burkard-travel-gallery wasn’t a misdirection. It was an invitation. Not to chase surf, but to follow silence: the low hum of geothermal vents, the crunch of rhyolite under boot, the way light pooled like liquid gold in a caldera at dawn. That realization — that Burkard’s work isn’t about coastline drama alone, but about presence in terrain too raw for postcards — changed how I travel. If you’re planning a trip inspired by his aesthetic, go beyond the coast. Go inland. Go slow. Bring extra batteries, waterproof gaiters, and patience for weather that erases trails mid-hike.

🌍 The setup: Why Iceland, why then, why alone?

I booked the trip in late February — a deliberate choice. Not for summer’s midnight sun or winter’s northern lights, but for the shoulder season’s liminal hush: roads reopening, snow retreating from lower valleys, and most international tourists still waiting for ‘safe’ temperatures. My goal wasn’t to replicate Burkard’s exact shots — impossible, given his access, timing, and decades of fieldwork — but to understand the conditions he works within: extreme cold, shifting light, logistical friction, and the physical cost of carrying gear across unmarked terrain.

I flew into Keflavík with two backpacks: one holding camera gear (a weather-sealed mirrorless body, three primes, two battery grips, and silica gel packs), the other holding clothing tested in Alaska winters — merino base layers, a hardshell jacket rated to -20°C, insulated overtrousers, and two pairs of waterproof hiking boots. No rental car. Instead, I committed to public transport and hitchhiking — partly budget-driven, partly to force interaction, partly to mirror the grounded, human-scaled movement Burkard often documents in his essays¹.

My itinerary started in Reykjavík, then moved east along Route 1, detouring north toward Þórsmörk via the F-roads — gravel tracks marked only by river crossings and GPS waypoints. I carried printed topographic maps (no signal guaranteed), a satellite communicator (Garmin inReach Mini 2), and a laminated list of emergency numbers in Icelandic and English. This wasn’t adventure tourism. It was reconnaissance.

🌄 The turning point: When the bus didn’t come

Day four. I waited at the Nýidalur trailhead bus stop — a wooden bench beside a rusted signpost — for the Strætó number 58, the only scheduled service connecting Þórsmörk to Reykjavík twice daily. At 10:15 a.m., the app showed ‘delayed’. At 10:42, it showed ‘cancelled’. No notification. No explanation. Just grey text on a cracked phone screen, rain misting the lens.

I sat, shivering, watching steam rise from hot springs nearby. My plan collapsed: no bus meant no return to Reykjavík that day, no access to charger or warm coffee, and — critically — no way to reach the next leg: Landmannalaugar, where Burkard shot much of the ‘Away From the Waves’ series. Panic flickered, then faded. I opened my notebook and wrote: What would he do? He’d walk.

So I did. Not all the way — that’s 35 km through riverbeds and ash fields — but 8 km along the Laugavegur trail’s western approach, following cairns half-buried in meltwater. The air smelled of wet basalt and sulfur. My boots filled with icy slurry. My fingers stiffened inside gloves. But something shifted: the urgency dissolved. Time stretched. I stopped photographing ‘subjects’ and began recording textures — the way lichen clung to obsidian shards, how frost feathered across frozen puddles, the weight of silence when wind dropped.

🏔️ The discovery: People who knew the land by memory, not map

At the Húsadalur mountain hut — a low-slung timber building steaming faintly at its eaves — I met Elín, a ranger who’d worked the highlands since 1998. She poured me strong black tea without asking, then pointed to a wall plastered with hand-drawn route sketches, weather logs, and photos taken on film. “Chris came here in ’15,” she said, tapping a faded print of a lone hiker dwarfed by rhyolite peaks. “He stayed ten days. Slept in the hut, walked alone, asked where the wind *stopped* — not where it blew hardest.”

That phrase stuck. Where the wind stopped. Not dramatic vistas. Not perfect light. A condition of stillness — rare, fleeting, earned. Over the next three days, Elín taught me to read the land differently: how moss thickness indicated soil stability, how steam plumes revealed subsurface heat, how sheep trails often followed ancient lava flows. She lent me her grandfather’s wool mittens — thick, lanolin-rich, smelling of peat smoke — and warned me not to cross the Emstrur river before noon. “The ice melts from underneath,” she said. “It looks solid. It isn’t.”

Later, at the Landmannalaugar campsite, I shared stove fuel with a group of Polish geology students mapping thermal gradients. One showed me how to calibrate exposure for alpine shadows — not with histogram readings, but by checking how many seconds it took for snow glare to burn my eyes. Another explained why Burkard avoids ND filters there: “The light changes too fast. You learn to meter by feel — like tuning a violin.”

🚌 The journey continues: Riding the highland bus, not chasing waves

The Strætó highland bus — the yellow 58, finally running — became my classroom. It wasn’t comfortable. Seats were vinyl and cracked. Windows fogged easily. But it moved slowly, stopping every 12–15 km so passengers could photograph, pee, or adjust gear. Drivers doubled as informal guides, pointing out volcanic fissures invisible from the road, naming craters after local poets, warning about sudden fog banks near Hverfjall.

I learned to pack for transit, not just destination: a dry bag inside my pack for electronics, ziplock bags labeled ‘lens cloths’, ‘batteries’, ‘emergency chocolate’. I stopped checking Instagram. Instead, I sketched compositions in a Moleskine — not to replicate Burkard, but to internalize rhythm: foreground rock, mid-ground slope, distant peak, sky occupying exactly 30% of frame. I noticed how he uses scale — placing a single human figure against vastness not for drama, but to measure time: how long it takes to walk that distance, how cold that shadow must be, how wind-scoured that ridge appears.

One afternoon, stranded for two hours near Ásbyrgi canyon due to a landslide, I watched a raven circle a cliff edge, wings locked, riding thermals I couldn’t feel. I lowered my camera. Took out my notebook. Wrote for 47 minutes — no photos, just observation. That entry remains the clearest record I have of that place.

💡 Reflection: What the absence of waves taught me

‘Away from the waves’ isn’t a rejection of coastlines. It’s a recalibration. Burkard’s gallery doesn’t exclude ocean — it simply refuses to center it as the default subject of ‘wilderness’. In Iceland, the sea is loud, obvious, photogenic. The highlands are quieter, drier, older. Their power isn’t kinetic; it’s geological. You don’t witness it — you register it in your knees, your breath, your sleep patterns.

I returned home with fewer ‘hero shots’ than I’d expected — no perfectly timed wave crashes, no aurora reflections in tidal pools. Instead, I had 387 frames of cracked earth, 127 of cloud-shadow movement across tundra, and one 42-minute timelapse of steam rising from a fumarole at -8°C. My editing process changed: I spent more time listening to audio recordings — wind over scree, boiling mud, distant sheep bells — than adjusting white balance. I began judging images not by technical perfection, but by whether they held the sensation of standing there: the grit in my teeth, the ache behind my eyes, the way cold made colors vibrate.

This wasn’t about becoming a better photographer. It was about becoming a more attentive traveler — one who understands that terrain teaches in increments: a river crossing rewrites your sense of time; a cancelled bus reshapes your definition of plan; a ranger’s mittens transmit generations of adaptation. The ‘gallery’ isn’t a collection of images. It’s the accumulated weight of decisions made in uncertain conditions — and the humility required to accept that some landscapes resist capture entirely.

📝 Practical takeaways: Lessons woven into motion

None of this was theoretical. Each insight emerged from friction — gear failure, schedule collapse, misread terrain. Here’s what translated directly to future trips:

“Don’t optimize for convenience. Optimize for continuity.” — Elín, Landmannalaugar ranger

That meant accepting slower transport not as delay, but as data collection: watching how light fell on slopes hour by hour, noting which plants emerged first after snowmelt, learning to estimate river depth by foam pattern. I stopped booking ‘experiences’ — no guided glacier hikes, no superjeep tours — and reserved energy for unstructured observation. When I did join a group (a geothermal survey near Hveravellir), I went as listener, not participant — asking questions about soil pH, not photo angles.

I adjusted my gear strategy. No more ‘one lens for everything’. Instead: fixed focal lengths only (24mm, 35mm, 85mm), each chosen for a specific spatial relationship — wide for context, normal for human scale, telephoto for compression and stillness. Batteries were stored in inner pockets, warmed by body heat. SD cards were backed up nightly onto a ruggedized SSD — not in a hotel, but in the hut’s communal drying room, where heat from the wood stove kept electronics functional.

Most importantly, I redefined ‘success’. On Day 9, I spent five hours waiting for light that never arrived — cloud cover remained total. I photographed nothing. But I mapped three new routes using drone-free aerial photos from the Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration’s public GIS portal², noted two unmarked hot spring locations (verified later with the Environment Agency of Iceland), and drafted notes on how glacial silt behaves at different moisture levels. That day felt like failure until I reviewed it months later — now foundational to how I pre-scout locations.

⭐ Conclusion: How quiet places reshape perspective

Leaving Iceland, I didn’t carry postcard memories. I carried muscle memory: the flex of calf climbing scree, the taste of mineral water drawn from a spring near Brennisteinsalda, the sound of my own breath syncing with wind rhythm. ‘Away from the waves’ ceased being a title and became a methodology — a way of moving through terrain that prioritizes duration over destination, listening over capturing, resilience over readiness.

It taught me that the most resonant travel moments aren’t those we stage, but those we endure: the bus cancellation, the soaked socks, the fog that erased the summit — all became anchors, not obstacles. Burkard’s gallery isn’t about escaping the coast. It’s about recognizing that true wildness isn’t always roaring. Sometimes it’s the pause between gusts. Sometimes it’s the heat rising from stone long after the sun has set. And sometimes — if you wait long enough, boots buried in ash, camera silent in your lap — it’s the exact second the wind stops.

❓ FAQs: Practical questions from the trail